lastminute.com, a leading European provider of dynamic travel packages, was expanding rapidly but could not efficiently scale its platform due to the physical limits and legacy architecture of its on-premises servers. The company also wanted a solution that would make it simpler to adhere to the security and data privacy requirements outlined in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a regulation on data protection and privacy in the European Union and the European Economic Area. To help handle certain GDPR requirements, lastminute.com had developed a custom service to encrypt and decrypt customers’ personal data, but this service required great effort to manage and maintain.

 

The company migrated its shopping search funnel databases to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to kick-start its digital transformation and achieve the elasticity that it needed to handle fluctuations in traffic caused by everything from COVID-19 pandemic–related travel restrictions to seasonal traffic peaks. By using AWS, lastminute.com can now achieve a better balance between costs and compute resource usage in virtually any contingency, helping the company to respond more flexibly to market changes. Migrating to the AWS Cloud also increased reliability and security, so lastminute.com can spend less time maintaining and managing its databases and can focus more on business innovation. In addition, AWS is committed to offering services and resources that customers can use to comply with the GDPR requirements that might apply to their activities; using these services and resources has helped lastminute.com to simplify its compliance with the GDPR.

 

Simplifying Infrastructure Management and Data Protection Compliance Using AWS

 

By providing services in 40 countries and 17 languages, lastminute.com reaches 60 million users worldwide through its digital platforms every month. Shopping search funnels—microservices that customers use to search for flights, hotels, or travel packages—offer access to millions of possible combinations of travel solutions in near real time. Providing customers this near-real-time shopping experience requires a large amount of compute resources when traffic is at its peak. Most of the company’s applications used to run flawlessly on its on-premises physical servers, which use the containerization technology Kubernetes. However, the company could not scale as needed, and managing its on-premises infrastructure was labor intensive.

 

lastminute.com chose to migrate to AWS because of the maturity of AWS services and the global availability that AWS offers, which help the travel company serve its customers around the world. In addition, the company wanted to achieve greater reliability and security by migrating its shopping search funnel databases to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. “Migrating our shopping search funnels to AWS helped us scale faster using the most innovative technologies on the market,” says Alessandro Gazzoni, manager of platform engineering at lastminute.com. Meeting lastminute.com’s obligations under the GDPR was also simpler due to the fully managed services the company uses on AWS, as well as the Shared Responsibility Model between AWS and its customers. “We no longer have to handle updates, system outages, or compliance documentation because AWS is fully in charge of the cloud infrastructure,” says Gazzoni. “AWS maintains compliance for the underlying infrastructure, so we can focus on the compliance of our application.”

 

Reducing On-Premises Infrastructure Costs by 30%

 

lastminute.com began migrating its shopping search funnel databases in January 2022 and finished the migration in March 2022. The company uses various AWS services to simplify infrastructure management, improve security and reliability, and reduce costs. For instance, it uses Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), a managed Kubernetes service to run Kubernetes in the AWS Cloud and on-premises data centers, both to attain a securer environment and to keep compute costs low. lastminute.com’s new system automatically provides capacity at a much lower price point than before, and the company can reduce capacity even further to control costs if necessary. By using AWS, lastminute.com also has access to the data and insights that it needs to understand its costs and its return on investment for each of the products that it runs in the cloud. Now that it has a clearer view, the company has reduced the cost of running its on-premises infrastructure by 30 percent.

 

Using AWS solutions to manage its infrastructure, the lastminute.com team no longer has to manage the lifecycle of its system and has significantly reduced the amount of time spent on maintenance. Prior to migration, upgrading Kubernetes required two full-time employees for 1 entire month. “We can build up all the systems from scratch in 30 minutes because of the automated, managed nature of AWS solutions,” says Gazzoni. The company has also reduced the capacity of its on-premises data center and can avoid the risk, expense, and labor of replacing 30 physical servers every 5 years.

 

By migrating to AWS, lastminute.com has also improved many aspects of its security compliance and was able to comply with specific GDPR requirements on security measures. The company uses AWS Security Hub, a cloud security posture management service, to achieve auditing capabilities and security insights. It uses AWS CloudTrail, a service for monitoring and recording account activity across AWS infrastructure, to improve its security posture. lastminute.com has also improved data access control by using AWS Security Token Service (AWS STS), a web service for requesting temporary, limited-privilege credentials. The company uses service control policies in AWS Organizations, a service for centrally managing and governing a company’s environment, to establish a regional boundary authorizing only European AWS Regions. Finally, lastminute.com has used specific AWS tools to implement infrastructure as code—a powerful mechanism for including security from the beginning of the design of an architecture—and was therefore able to meet the GDPR requirements of data protection by design and default.

 

The company has also reduced outage recovery time by 50 percent using AWS solutions. “That’s a huge improvement from a business-continuity and a disaster-recovery perspective,” says Gazzoni. Improving reliability and security means that lastminute.com can offer a better customer experience. Travelers can rest assured that their data is protected and that they’ll enjoy a smooth and uninterrupted experience as they book their next adventure.

 

Completing Its Migration to the Cloud

 

Migrating its shopping search funnel databases to the AWS Cloud kicked off a business-wide digital transformation for lastminute.com, and the travel retailer is now ready to deliver secure and seamless customer experiences at virtually any scale. The company plans an all-in migration to the cloud and will soon migrate its remaining on-premises workloads to AWS.

“Using AWS, we built a better user experience because resources are always available on demand to cover the traffic,” says Gazzoni.